Lately, we have been seeing comments on the internet mainly on Facebook concerning health personnel behaviour and practice, mostly related to medical doctors. The comments are varied, dealing with arrogance, poor personal relationship, not being punctual for appointments, over-booking of patients (over 60 patients for the practice of 3 – 4 hours in the evening) high costs of medical bills, etc. Looking at these comments/allegations one tends to think about the quality of medical care practised in hospitals and clinics in the country. Of course the comments and allegations on the internet are one-sided. There can be valid explanations if one asks the concerned healthcare practitioners as the doctor-patient relationship is usually excellent in Myanmar.
However, if some of the comments and allegations have some validity we should be thinking about the standard of medical practice seriously. In other words, are we practising what in the medical world is termed “Good Medical Practice”? The Medical Councils all over the world are specifying the type of medical practice expected of their medical doctors which can be specified as “Good Medical Practice”. Good Medical Practice (GMP) is a professional guideline which we as medical doctors need to observe strictly. As a ‘good’ medical doctor you should make care of the patient your first priority, be competent and keep abreast with developments in medicine so as to provide good quality service, observe medical ethics, have a good relationship with patients, and act immediately if you think patient safety is compromised. These are in brief general characteristics of a GMP. The leading article in this issue is on GMP and will give an elaborate description of what is required to conduct a Good Medical Practice.
The training and development of medical doctors and allied health personnel are mainly the responsibility of respective universities. It is up to these universities to produce a graduate who is not only a qualified technical person but also caring, compassionate person imbibed with altruistic principles. This is indeed a daunting task and the universities are trying their best to fulfill the mission and we wish them the best.
We also take this opportunity to wish all of our readers and practitioners a safe, peaceful, happy and healthy New Year 2023.
